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Comment by MarkusWandel | Hacker News Reader

Don't Chromebooks already do a nag on every boot if they're unlocked?

Why not do it on phones too? It's not like they get rebooted very often. That would totally combat the "compromised phone sold as clean" issue.

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Don't know about Chromebooks; I have some Chromeboxes, all unlocked, and all of them show the Coreboot splash screen before booting but no nags or warning signs. My Pixel7, however, since installing GrapheneOS shows a very detailed screen on boot indicating the operating system has been swapped. not a problem for me, but surely It'd raise alerts if I wanted to sell the phone. So it's not like phone manufacturers lack ways of telling the user that something happened. To me it's just the old security by obscurity mentality paired with greed: a lighter and open OS on the phone translates in less user data being exfiltrated, longer device life and potentially fewer sales of newer phones.

Upon boot my custom ROM'd Xiaomi's give a five second warning page telling me the bootloader is unlocked, so, yeah, it's not hidden.

There may be ways to suppress that though.

So that means that the stated reason for further rate-limiting boot loader unlocks (to prevent unlocked, compromised phones from being sold as clean) is BS.

Yep, lots of phones do this and in big scary letters.

my redmi note 9 has a small icon with a unlocked lock in the top middle on boot not much compared to a pixel though.

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